A Recipe for Country Living

Since I've been daydreaming about becoming a country bumpkin, I'd love to order Lehman's Non Electric Catalog.

Lehman's is a 50-year-old company in Ohio's Amish country, with a unique bunch of well-made, carefully selected and useful tools for "sustainable" living," says Cool Tools. "Emphasis is on cooking, homesteading, farming, gardening, and doing things for yourself....Kitchen equipment, canning supplies, copper kettles, cheese-making supplies, grain grinders, toboggans, kerosene lanterns, axes, water pumps. The hard copy (172 pp. catalog) is way better than the electronic version. If you're into this stuff, and/or you live in the country, you'll end up reading it like a book.

Recycle Your Netflix

Netflix Origami gives step-by-step instructions on how to shape your Netflix sleeve into a functional work or art. My favorites: the snack tray (above) and the "starched shirt."

Should hotels charge for Internet service?

Why are some hotels still charging for Internet?! Even the mid-grade brands. A breakdown of which hotels charge, plus, a list of hotels that offer Internet for free.

read more | digg story

Five-star hotels at a one-star price

Leading Hotels Hotels of the World is offering a huge discount for its anniversary: Pay $19.28 a night this fall. Register for the October 1st auction.

read more | digg story

First E. choli, now this?

Is this photo for real?

The Easiest Forecast Ever

Umbrella Today lets you punch in your zip code and simply answers the question. Who needs weather.com?

Surprise! Medalist Phelps is a Skeev!

Radar writers saw Michael Phelps "massively skeeving on girls at the Playboy Club" in that Las Vegas. And there's pictures to prove it.

Funky Design

A cool bench.

On My List

Go to "Drawing Babar"

Good Neighbors

Last night, I could smell the most delicious curry wafting through the hallway of my apartment building. I noticed my neighbor's door was open, and asked her if she was making curry. She immediately came to the door and invited me in, and made me a bowl full of rice and chicken curry. I was stunned. I'd never spoken to her before, and with just a few words, I had dinner in my hand and had made a new friend. Thanks, Angela!

The Great Muppet 'Caker'

Check out this ridiculously (and wonderfully) ornate Muppet cake. Looks like Zoot's even got a marzipan saxophone!

The Glass House

I wrote earlier about the Octagon house, and now I want to visit the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. The transparent building was the private home of American architect Philip Johnson, built in 1949. It's now part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and its re-opening to the public aims to drive home the need to save modern architecture.

I'll Take Two of These, In Blue

Check out The Lifepod: Lodging for the Modern Nomad. Design blog Inhabitat says:

Escape to the beach, the mountains or the trees in San Francisco-based Kyu Che’s sustainable Lifepod. Loosely based on the traditional Mongolian ger (or ‘yurt’ as the Russian translation goes), the Lifepod is at once organic and high-tech. Built to be highly portable, the Lifepod is a fully functioning, off-the-grid mini capsule for modern nomadic living.

Design of the Day

Neat, handmade clocks by artist Roger Wood.

Start Getting Angry

The Department of Health and Human Services is about to limit access to birth control and abortion for women on the grounds of protecting those who find it morally objectionable. According to the Washington Post, "The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors' offices and other entities if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds."

DailyKos breaks it down here.

Cloud Nine

Check out this unusual cloud formation in Hawaii...

Staten Island Adventure

Finally, here are photos of last month's Staten Island adventure. We took the free ferry over to a fantastic, hidden gem of a restaurant called Enoteca Maria where we enjoyed incredible delicacies, great wine, and great company! Mary was very interested in the history of the ferry -- apparently it's had quite a few accidents since starting in 1898. Still, we can't wait to go back. Oh, and at Enoteca Maria, I highly recommend the zuchini flowers stuffed with ham and mozzarella. I was skeptical that zuchini could taste so good, but Laura convinced me to get them and I wasn't disappointed!

The Incomparable Alec

"I still want to do the episode of '30 Rock' where we make fun of 'Grey's Anatomy'--where everyone on our show talks about something important for thirty seconds and then goes in a room and fucks each other."

--Alec Baldwin, in the Sept. 8 issue of The New Yorker

Brooklyn Flea

This morning I enjoyed a delicious peach clafoutis that Laura made. I know, cla-WHO-tee, you may ask? It sounds funny but it's a delicious fresh fruit baked in a light batter. Yumm! Then I went to the fabulous Brooklyn Flea Market and bought these four antique tin ceiling tiles. I've been wanting to hang a tableau of old tiles for a long time now and couldn't resist these beauties from the booth of Olde Goode Things. This is how they're now hanging on the wall. What do you think?

Too Strange for Words

"A 'dead' man's son spots him on television after eight years," reports the Telegraph. Long after he thought his dad was dead and buried, this guy in the UK sees him on a show about missing people. Apparently, he had been in an assisted living facility nearby the whole time, but could not remember his name.

"Police have apologised for an extraordinary series of errors which led to him being declared dead and an unidentified man being cremated in his place." Um...

Walk this Way

A new study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine finds that you can infer a woman's history of vaginal orgasm by observing the way she walks.

"Trained sexologists were able to correctly infer vaginal orgasm through watching the way the women walked over 80 percent of the time. Further analysis revealed that the sum of stride length and vertebral rotation was greater for the vaginally orgasmic women. "This could reflect the free, unblocked energetic flow from the legs through the pelvis to the spine," the authors note.

This is weird.

Sounds to me like some scientists were having fun watching young women "videotaped from a distance while walking in a public place" and placing wagers on their "orgasmic history."

A Mass E-mail

Now as you may or may not know, I'm a bit of a technology curmudgeon lately -- go figure! So I thought Amy Ozols' paen to the mass e-mail in this week's New Yorker was super funny. Absolutely everybody prefaces their mass e-mails by apologizing for sending them! And you know those e-mails that get sent out because someone lost their phone and can't remember anyone's number? That's what she's talking about and she knocks it out of the park!

Two work lunch faves

There's nothing like a steaming bowl of matzoh ball soup from Ben's Deli! My other favorite lunch spot near work is just a few doors down at Pick-a-Pita. A pita jam packed with falafel, tabouli, carrots, onions, cucumbers and pretty much anything else you can think of. At $5, it's pretty much the best lunch deal in this neighborhood. Both are on West 38th street between seventh and eighth avenues. They also both happen to be kosher. This area is an interesting mix of fabric shops, kosher food, and tourists looking for Times Square!

Say what?

Cindy McCain's RNC outfit priced at $300K!

And the GOP keeps talking about getting back to basics and how they are "real people." Ironic, eh? Cindy McCain scares me.

Labor Day Fun

I can't believe I haven't written about the lovely (and very last minute) vacation I took with my sister and her two little kiddies. I had been jonesing to get out of the city for weeks and wanted to get on the beach for Labor Day. My ill-fated attempt to do a house swap came up short.

If you can believe it, I called a rental cottage that I found online in Watch Hill, Rhode Island on Friday morning before the weekend and they had a vacancy! I even managed to talk the woman down in price. I happen to be fact checking an article about vacation rentals and all of the questions you're supposed to ask and how to prepare in advance. I did none of that. I just asked when we should show up. And it worked out perfectly (thank God). Kat was an incredible trooper agreeing to hop in the car at a moment's notice. We piled the trunk with the requisite high chairs and blankets and diapers, cranked the Deb Talon and we were off!

The cottage was simple and suited us perfectly. The one glitch was the terribly soft bed, but after wine and unisom Kat and I slept like babies. There was an adorable antique carousel down the road from the cottage that Gracie got to ride each day and we all had our share of the local homemade ice cream. The ocean was super refreshing and Charlie kept us on our toes chasing seagulls and making a bee-line for the surf. A seagull pooped on me and I thought it was sunscreen at first and then ran into he ocean to wash it off--no biggie! And we walked to the Watch Hill lighthouse with stellar views and friendly locals. What a way to end the summer -- small town bliss!